University–CyanLines Partnership Strengthens Community Engagement for Manchester’s Blue Green Network

The University of Manchester, through its Creative Manchester Research Platform, has partnered with CyanLines in a 12-month Innovation Fellowship, funded through Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF). The fellowship will be fulfilled by anthropologist, Dr Sarah O’Brien.

The University of Manchester, through its Creative Manchester Research Platform, has partnered with CyanLines in a 12-month Innovation Fellowship, funded through Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF). The fellowship will be fulfilled by anthropologist, Dr Sarah O’Brien.

CyanLines is an ambitious partnership project supported by public and private sector funders, aiming to integrate blue and green spaces in Manchester. The vision is to connect the city’s canal paths, parks, rivers into an integrated and accessible network routes for walking, wheeling, cycling and running. In a bid to be a durable and relevant connected infrastructure, CyanLines seeks to develop this network with the different neighbourhoods bordering the routes, bringing together actors across the private, public and charitable sectors, as well as residents, commuters, community groups and grassroots organisations.

Dr O’Brien is an anthropologist who has worked on infrastructures, landscapes and future-making in areas of nuclear waste management in rural France and has also conducted ethnographic research on environmental activism in the UK, writing about truth and responsibility. She has experience in immersive qualitative research, interdisciplinary collaboration and participatory creative methods.

The 12-month knowledge exchange fellowship will allow Sarah to continue some of the work she started with CyanLines, in a pilot project earlier in 2026, whereby she started to explore community engagement around the proposed route CL 5, the “Piccadilly to the Etihad Campus loop”. A collaborative public workshop at Bridge 5 Mill in Holt Town resulted in rich conversations around ecological spaces, urban regeneration projects, accessibility and inclusion – beautifully captured by Illuscribe in the live illustrations below. This work emphasises that infrastructures and landscapes are not merely planned points in space: they are the socio-ecological relations and stories upholding them through time. Importantly, these stories and experiences include materials, humans, and other living beings, and they can tell us a lot about possibilities for the future.